BEIJING — Even before Alibaba went online, its founder talked about making the fledgling e-commerce company a global player.

At Alibaba Group’s first staff meeting in 1999, a video shot by an employee shows Jack Ma rallying a workforce of 17 of his friends. They met in a cement-floored apartment in Hangzhou, a city southwest of Shanghai, at a time when few Chinese were online. Ma was an English teacher with no training in business or computers.

“Our competitors are not in China but in Silicon Valley,” says Ma in the video, which is included in a documentary about the company, “Crocodile in the Yangtze,” made by a former Alibaba vice president Porter Erisman. “We can beat government agencies and big, famous companies because of our innovative spirit.”

Such Silicon Valley-style bluster was new to China, but Ma delivered. Over the next 15 years, he helped propel Alibaba through technical and financial challenges and a battle with eBay to become the world’s biggest online bazaar.

The company is now planning to list in the U.S., and analysts say its initial public offering this year may raise up to $20 billion.

Last year, 231 million customers spent $248 billion with merchants on Alibaba’s platforms, more than Amazon.com Inc. and eBay combined.

Along the way, Alibaba had to develop e-commerce infrastructure that its Western counterparts took for granted. Few Chinese used credit cards, so it created Alipay, a payments system that helped online sales win acceptance by allowing wary customers to receive goods before releasing money to sellers.

“Alibaba really created the e-commerce market in China,” said Edward Yu, president of research firm Analysys International.

Today, the company’s main platforms are its original business-to-business service Alibaba.com, consumer-to-consumer site Taobao and TMall for brands to sell to consumers.

Alibaba has expanded into personal finance, games, video and other services. In March, it was one of 10 companies picked by Beijing to set up China’s first privately financed banks since the 1949 communist revolution.

In a Silicon Valley-style innovation, Alibaba cultivated a hardworking but playful corporate culture that was a novelty in China’s state-dominated economy. An annual employee talent show grew into Alifest, a raucous event held in a soccer stadium before an audience of thousands. Ma takes part by singing Chinese pop songs.

“Alibaba allowed people to shape their own destiny instead of working for a state-owned company or the government bureaucracy,” said Erisman.

The early years were a roller coaster of successes and setbacks. In 1999, Alibaba raised $5 million from investors such as Goldman Sachs and then $20 million from Japan’s Softbank. Plans called for raising more through a stock market offering, but the Internet bubble burst in 2000 and interest in tech shares evaporated.

“We suffered much more than any other Internet company,” Ma told BBC in 2001.

The next year, Alibaba faced its biggest threat when eBay acquired EachNet, a company that had 80 percent of China’s small consumer e-commerce market.

In 2004, then-CEO Meg Whitman said eBay expected China to be its biggest market in 10 to 15 years. In 2006, eBay gave up and turned over its China operation to a local partner.

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